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    One Minus One
    One Minus One
    One Minus One
    Audiobook5 hours

    One Minus One

    Written by Ruth Doan MacDougall and Nancy Pearl

    Narrated by Amy McFadden

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    The year is 1969, a time of turmoil for the United States—and for thirty-year-old Emily Bean, who, following her devastating divorce, leaves her home in the New Hampshire mountains to work as a teacher in the state’s coastal region.

    Still in love with her ex-husband, David, Emily struggles to adjust to single life. Women’s liberation and the freewheeling sixties had only been on the perimeter of her married life, so even walking into a restaurant alone makes insecure Emily self-conscious.

    The men in town are quick to notice an available and attractive young woman with legs made for miniskirts. Emily falls into relationships with two men, one of whom could be her way back to the safe life that she lost.

    But in this portrait of a woman on the brink of self-realization, Emily must learn whether or not she can truly recapture the past.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBrilliance Audio
    Release dateFeb 19, 2013
    ISBN9781469276793
    One Minus One
    Author

    Ruth Doan MacDougall

    Ruth Doan MacDougall, whose father wrote novels and hiking books, began writing stories of her own at the age of six in her hometown of Laconia, New Hampshire. She never stopped. Today, she is the respected author of deeply felt novels about the lives of women, including The Cheerleader, her acclaimed coming-of-age bestseller about a teenage girl in the 1950s, which launched her acclaimed Snowy Series. A recipient of the New Hampshire Writers’ Project’s Lifetime Achievement Award, MacDougall continues to write novels and to update her late father’s hiking books. She is happy to say that she is still madly in love with her husband of fifty-five years and explains that her novel One Minus One came about when she tried to imagine what her life would be like if they ever divorced. She lives in Center Sandwich, New Hampshire.

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    Reviews for One Minus One

    4/5

    10 ratings2 reviews

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    • 4/5
      The only thing I didn't like about One Minus One is the fact that I'll never learn how the main character's life turned out. This book is so well written and the characters are so beautifully drawn that I felt like I knew them all. There isn't a plot, per se, but I'll choose character over action any day. It was superb. I gulped it down.
    • 4/5
      ONE MINUS ONE, by Ruth Doan MacDougall. This is a MacDougall book I'd never heard of until I noticed it recently as a Nancy Pearl BOOK LUST Rediscovery edition (2013). Pearl tells us in her intro to that she's been a fan of MacDougall and her SNOWY books since she was a college student in 1965, and also tells us that she has always been most drawn to "character-driven" novels. Me too, Nancy. Maybe that's why we're both fans of Ruth's work. Because all of her SNOWY books are certainly about the characters more than they are about plot. And ONE MINUS ONE's protagonist, newly divorced Emily Bean, is a fascinating character. Heartbroken that her husband of ten-plus years had left her for another younger woman, Emily is trying to figure out what comes next. She's a wannabe-writer, as yet unpublished, but now she has to make a living, so takes a job teaching high school English, and doesn't like it very much. Filled with self-doubt, fears, sorrows and regrets, she doggedly forges ahead with her life, entering into a loveless affair with a local radio announcer in the small New Hampshire town she's moved to. Then into yet another perhaps more promising one with a fellow teacher. And, for a young woman (she's 31) who seems quite well-brought up and lady-like, she is also a surprisingly sensual creature, as is evidenced by a couple of decidedly juicy sex scenes. The fact is Emily Bean is about as natural a "human bean" as you'll find in the pages of fiction. And I kept being reminded that this is a book first published in 1971, because it's full of touches from that era - the clothes, the TV shows, the music, cigarettes, snacks, rent and food prices, etc. All of it works for this novel, and all of it screams late sixties, early seventies. Which was okay with me. I enjoyed remembering it all.Like a number of other reader/reviewers, I may have wished for more of a resolution at the book's end, but that didn't really bother me so much. Real life often lacks resolution, or closure. And Emily is still stuck with all the good memories of her failed marriage, still a little in love with her ex, so c'mon, readers. Give her a little more time, okay? She'll come around, I'm sure.Here's my own post-script. I wish Nancy Pearl had chosen another MacDougall book long out of print, one that's my own personal favorite. WIFE AND MOTHER was, I think, a much better novel, one with some weight, enough that it has stayed with me since the first time I read it, more than 35 years ago. (And I've read it a couple times since.) I think it deserves a new generation of readers. This book? It's a pretty decent and very entertaining read, a kind of literary time capsule with a most believable heroine in Emily Bean. Highly recommended, especially if you're a fan of Ruth Doan MacDougall's work.